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A review by hades9stages
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
5.0
Beauvoir said that only when writing The Second Sex had she understood that the vast majority of women simply did not have the choices that she had had and that women are, in fact, defined and treated as the second sex by a male-oriented society (Beauvoir, 1976).
This is an existentialist feminist philosophical book. So, it's super interesting and intelligent. And it's a very good book, in fact. Especially for one written in 1940s Europe. This review contains a lot of quotes, but I just had to share them. I also like re-reading my reviews so these quotes are mostly for me to come back to and think about again later.
If the ‘vast majority of women’, as Beauvoir thinks, are oppressed everywhere, why do they often accept their situation? She thinks that women, like all ‘economically and politically dominated peoples anywhere’ first have to realise that they are in a disadvantaged and unfair position, and then they have to think it is possible to change it. Beauvoir presents women are shaped by their position in society to the point that often they do not even realise that they are oppressed.
"… those [women] who have the most to lose from taking a stand, that is, women like me who have carved out a successful sinecure or career, have to be willing to risk insecurity – be it merely ridicule – in order to gain self-respect. And they have to understand that those of their sisters who are most exploited will be the last to join them. A worker’s wife, for example, is least free to join the movement. She knows that her husband is more exploited than most feminist leaders and that he depends on her role as the housewife-mother to survive himself. Anyway, for all these reasons, women did not move."
What, Beauvoir asks, does it mean to be a woman? Beauvoir rejects the essentialist view, which contradicts the fundamental existentialist claim that existence precedes essence, that the free choices of our consciousness determine what we are. In this sense, her famous formula ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (Le deuxième sexe II: 13/267) is for her, a philosophical platitude. But Beauvoir also rejects the anti-essentialist view: Being a woman is, at least in our world, not a casual fact, irrelevant to a person’s core identity - any more than is being Jewish or black or old. Nor is being a woman simply a matter of one’s own choice: precisely how you are a woman may be up to you, but the fact that you are a woman and that this fact makes a great deal of difference is imposed on you by your situation. On that view, being a woman could limit my freedom only to the extent that I chose it to be a limitation. Beauvoir, however, recognizes that some features of my situation may well be obstacles to my freedom no matter how I choose. It does not follow that such a feature must always be an obstacle: we can imagine a situation in which being a woman is of no more significance than having blue eyes. But the fact is that in the current historical situation, being a woman does restrict your freedom, no matter how you choose to live your life. This is a significant revision of the naïve existentialist conception of freedom.
"[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,’ some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, ‘They are not women’, even though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. It is typically described in vague and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. Does the word ‘woman’, then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment philosophy, rationalism or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’."
"My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.’ But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for anti-feminists to show that women are not men. Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. Rejecting the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex."
"Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being."
Even when a woman's rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs.
And she continues,
"To prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology, and so forth. At most they were willing to grant ‘separate but equal status’ to the other sex. That winning formula is most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into practice with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance: whether it is race, caste, class or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same."
A must-read. Iconic. You don't necessarily have to be a seasoned existentialist to be super interested or convinced by what she says.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a crucial work for the feminist movement that developed from the 1960s onwards, although it was first published in 1949. Beauvoir was not only aware of the delay of its impact, but also regarded it as consistent with the inevitable obstacles that women encounter in understanding their own situation.
This is an existentialist feminist philosophical book. So, it's super interesting and intelligent. And it's a very good book, in fact. Especially for one written in 1940s Europe. This review contains a lot of quotes, but I just had to share them. I also like re-reading my reviews so these quotes are mostly for me to come back to and think about again later.
If the ‘vast majority of women’, as Beauvoir thinks, are oppressed everywhere, why do they often accept their situation? She thinks that women, like all ‘economically and politically dominated peoples anywhere’ first have to realise that they are in a disadvantaged and unfair position, and then they have to think it is possible to change it. Beauvoir presents women are shaped by their position in society to the point that often they do not even realise that they are oppressed.
"… those [women] who have the most to lose from taking a stand, that is, women like me who have carved out a successful sinecure or career, have to be willing to risk insecurity – be it merely ridicule – in order to gain self-respect. And they have to understand that those of their sisters who are most exploited will be the last to join them. A worker’s wife, for example, is least free to join the movement. She knows that her husband is more exploited than most feminist leaders and that he depends on her role as the housewife-mother to survive himself. Anyway, for all these reasons, women did not move."
What, Beauvoir asks, does it mean to be a woman? Beauvoir rejects the essentialist view, which contradicts the fundamental existentialist claim that existence precedes essence, that the free choices of our consciousness determine what we are. In this sense, her famous formula ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (Le deuxième sexe II: 13/267) is for her, a philosophical platitude. But Beauvoir also rejects the anti-essentialist view: Being a woman is, at least in our world, not a casual fact, irrelevant to a person’s core identity - any more than is being Jewish or black or old. Nor is being a woman simply a matter of one’s own choice: precisely how you are a woman may be up to you, but the fact that you are a woman and that this fact makes a great deal of difference is imposed on you by your situation. On that view, being a woman could limit my freedom only to the extent that I chose it to be a limitation. Beauvoir, however, recognizes that some features of my situation may well be obstacles to my freedom no matter how I choose. It does not follow that such a feature must always be an obstacle: we can imagine a situation in which being a woman is of no more significance than having blue eyes. But the fact is that in the current historical situation, being a woman does restrict your freedom, no matter how you choose to live your life. This is a significant revision of the naïve existentialist conception of freedom.
"[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb,’ some say. Yet speaking of certain women, the experts proclaim, ‘They are not women’, even though they have a uterus like the others. Everyone agrees there are females in the human species; today, as in the past, they make up about half of humanity; and yet we are told that ‘femininity is in jeopardy’; we are urged, ‘Be women, stay women, become women.’ So not every female human being is necessarily a woman; she must take part in this mysterious and endangered reality known as femininity. Is femininity secreted by the ovaries? Is it enshrined in a Platonic heaven? Is a frilly petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women zealously strive to embody it, the model has never been patented. It is typically described in vague and shimmering terms borrowed from a clairvoyant’s vocabulary. If there is no such thing today as femininity, it is because there never was. Does the word ‘woman’, then, have no content? It is what advocates of Enlightenment philosophy, rationalism or nominalism vigorously assert: women are, among human beings, merely those who are arbitrarily designated by the word ‘woman’."
"My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, whoever we are, should be considered as human beings.’ But nominalism is a doctrine that falls a bit short; and it is easy for anti-feminists to show that women are not men. Certainly woman like man is a human being; but such an assertion is abstract; the fact is that every concrete human being is always uniquely situated. Rejecting the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul or the Jewish character is not to deny that there are today Jews, blacks or women: this denial is not a liberation for those concerned, but an inauthentic flight. Clearly, no woman can claim without bad faith to be situated beyond her sex."
"Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularises it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolises, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam’s ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words. Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being."
Even when a woman's rights are recognised abstractly, long-standing habit keeps them from being concretely manifested in customs.
And she continues,
"To prove women’s inferiority, antifeminists began to draw not only, as before, on religion, philosophy and theology, but also on science: biology, experimental psychology, and so forth. At most they were willing to grant ‘separate but equal status’ to the other sex. That winning formula is most significant: it is exactly that formula the Jim Crow laws put into practice with regard to black Americans; this so-called egalitarian segregation served only to introduce the most extreme forms of discrimination. This convergence is in no way pure chance: whether it is race, caste, class or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same."
A must-read. Iconic. You don't necessarily have to be a seasoned existentialist to be super interested or convinced by what she says.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a crucial work for the feminist movement that developed from the 1960s onwards, although it was first published in 1949. Beauvoir was not only aware of the delay of its impact, but also regarded it as consistent with the inevitable obstacles that women encounter in understanding their own situation.